


within the void we are breathless

by meritmut



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ahch-To, Angst, Canon Compliant, Dreams vs. Reality, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Visions, Freudian Elements, Introspection, Jungian themes, Mirrors, Sexual Content, Sexual Fantasy, let's get psychosexual
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-11
Updated: 2018-05-20
Packaged: 2019-03-03 13:40:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13342407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: There's something beneath the island.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> abyss of dying dreams  
> cascading delirium  
> mirrored waters
> 
> — ne obliviscaris, 'eyrie'

Down under the island, the shrinking universe of mirrors encloses and enfolds around Rey until there stand before and after her a thousand wide-eyed reflections, not imitations but iterations of the girl staring back: each one a self in her own right, a self fragmented, scattered echoes all walking a variation of the same path to arrive together at this moment, like a ray of light broken into a million strands which, as they cohere, become whole again.

She was always meant to come here, she knows that now. She hadn’t known what it was that called to her, what strange song she’d followed across the stars, but the power of this place wraps around her like a soft wind and Rey _understands_.

 _You have walked this path before, child,_ the icy night breeze stirs her hair, making her skin prickle, _and you will walk it again._

She will always come to this place, because she always has. No matter the steps taken along the way—no matter the years, the places where her path seemed to twist and turn in ways she never could’ve foreseen—it would always have brought her to this point.

She’s no idea of where it goes from here, only that the journey is not yet done, and she must walk it to its end.

But what does she hope to find down here, at the nadir point of the Force itself? The truth, perhaps: the truth that slips from her grasp every time she thinks she’s getting close, the truth she’s failed to find anywhere else on this damned island.

Answers, maybe; answers that no one else can give.

 _Let me see them, let me see them, let me see—_ she whispers to the darkness, doesn’t know if she’s pleading or praying or what it is she longs to see most, or who she imagines might be listening.

But in the shadows, _something_ hears.

Rey’s heart gives an unsteady lurch.

The mirror’s aged surface is shifting, clouding, a new vision taking shape. Out of the fog, something begins to move towards her.

_Show them to me, I want to see, let me see…_

Childlike instinct moves her to lift her hand and press it to the glass, reaching out as though she could sweep aside the haze with her bare fist and see clearly the two human figures coming to stand before her, their features indistinct as smoke even though they’re so _close_ —close enough that she could touch them if there were nothing in the way, she could see the whites of their eyes, the colour of their hair, the shape of their smiles, she could remember…

_Who were you? What happened to you? Where did you go?_

The two shift together, their edges blurring until there’s only one person standing there, barely inches away from her, tall and dark and _familiar_.

That figure raises a hand, and rests it against Rey’s own.

_Please…_

The vision shifts again and Rey can do nothing but watch, her heart in her throat, as the silvery hoarfrost covering the mirror begins to melt away and the figure in the glass with it, the impression of broad shoulders and curling hair dissolving right before her eyes until all that’s left is—

_—no, wait—_

—her own reflection, spun on into forever in the soft half-light of the cave; the reflection of a girl, sinking to her knees on the grotto’s stone floor, looking into her own eyes and beginning to understand for the first time the shape of the wound that was inflicted there so long ago.

Oh, the mirror has a truth for her, and while it is not the answer she sought or wanted it is an answer all the same.

_You are on your own, as you have always been, Rey from nowhere._

Rey from nowhere, Rey of Jakku, dead girl from a dead world with salt on her lips and ash on her tongue, and you can take the sandrat out of the desert but you’ll never exorcise the emptiness from inside her, the spectre of that forsaken place that clings to the skin like a miasma, like the charnel-house reek of carrion in the sun.

(On Jakku we don’t burn our dead: we haven’t the fuel to spare, wouldn’t waste it if we did on those who are beyond the need for something to keep them warm at night. In the high regions where the land is more rock and sand than earth, we leave the bodies to the air, to the birds and the beasts and the sun, one last offering to the gods of those places. In others, where the sands are not so light as to be swept aside by the storms and the canyons run deep enough to yield earth instead of stone, we bury the bones of those who’ve left us and pray they do not visit us again.

There’s neither earth deep enough nor predators hungry enough on Ahch-to: perhaps it would be to the sea we’d give our lost ones.)

Behind her, the narrow entrance to the sea-cave lets in a flood of lucid silver light bright enough to illuminate the whole grotto, the sliver of moonlit water beyond the opening in the stone still and perfect as glass, cold as the thrill of fear that dances down her spine. She’s not a confident swimmer—when has she spent long enough near water in her life to learn?—the best she can manage is the instinctive thrashing of a creature that resolutely  _does not want to drown_  and she considers abruptly that it may not be enough to get her out of here alive.

She’s seen the creatures that live in the waters surrounding the archipelago, the great spine-backed serpents that hunt in the fathomless depths below the waves: when she reaches out into the Force she can  _feel_  them, great teeming oceans of life far below where the light of sun or moon or stars can reach. What kind of meal would she make, skinny desert girl, for the ravenous maw of the sea?

At least you wouldn’t go to waste, she supposes, flattening her palm against the glass again. Under her curious touch it feels less like the flawless surface of a ship’s viewport and more like the stuff that makes up the Crackle, those strange twisted deformities of petrified sand that crawl up out of the ground on that infernal plain, wild and unnatural as something out of a dream, lethal enough to slice bare skin to ribbons if you make one wrong step.

In the mirror her reflections blink back at her, one girl cut up into thousands, an insect trapped in amber, lost forever in the silver-black dark.

What a wretched picture she makes now, crouched and shivering in the frigid cavern, soaked to the bone and pale as some drowned thing washed up on the rocks. She looks like a corpse, like a thing already dead.

 _What did you think you’d see?_  Those other Reys stare back, moonlight cold in their gaze.  _What answers did you think you’d find here?_

Behind her, the shadows coil and shift.

The dark isn’t done with her yet.

Barely conscious of the chill bleeding through her damp leggings, leeching the warmth from her bones with every passing moment, Rey squints into the darkness at the space over her left shoulder where something moves in the murky glass, a wisp of shadow threatening to become something more.

Is it another vision? Something else the Force has to show her, some final truth to flay out of her before it’s done?

 _No_.

The breath catches in her throat.

_Of course…_

Leaning forward, Rey rests her brow against the cool surface of the mirror and lets her eyes fall closed.

She _knows_ the man stepping out of the darkness, shrouded from head to foot in ashy black, his eyes like bitter embers in the sepulchral gloom of the cave.

There’s something different about him, and maybe it should disturb her that she’s become familiar enough with way his presence feels to make that kind of distinction but it doesn’t, not really; there’s a part of her that’s whispered from the moment they met that she would know him anywhere.

 _(I feel it too,_ he tells her, days or years or lifetimes from here, a parody of tenderness that shakes her to the core as much as the truth behind it. She doesn’t understand, yet, what it is he means.)

_I would know._

(She pushes back, and _sees.)_

 _Blind or deaf or cold in my grave,_ she thinks, _I would know you_.

He feels…quieter, somehow, the discordant rumble of his Force signature conspicuous by its silence. Maybe it’s only that this place is so _much,_ its power so deafening, that it drowns him out.

Or, maybe, it’s not really him, just some artifice of the Force come to taunt her with how alone she truly is.

 _You’ve been so lonely—_ ah, how softly he had done it, how gently he had prised her open and dug her secrets out of her with his fingers, held them up to the light for inspection like scrap under the sun. How she had _hated_ him for it. _So afraid._

She’s not afraid now, not of him or of whatever the cave will have her see. She’s come this far. No turning back now.

“What were you looking for, down here?”

His voice is pitched so low that Rey can barely hear it, as though he’s loath to disturb the subaqueous stillness of this place. She can hear him moving, though: he’s closer, now, only a few feet away from her in the dark.

 _I don’t know._ “Answers.” She takes a deep breath, lifts her head to look at him where his reflection hangs over her shoulder like some gaunt-faced wraith, come to pick over her scabs before they’ve even done bleeding. “It wanted to show me something.”

(Maybe it is really him, maybe it isn’t; maybe it’s easier to be honest because she can’t be sure.)

She watches him take her in slowly, picking up on the glimmer of tears on her cheeks, the lost, helpless demeanour of a girl who’s come so far and has no idea of where to go from here. “Did it?”

“I…”

_Myself, for whatever that’s worth._

Kylo frowns. “What isn’t that worth?”

Rey blinks. It shouldn’t startle her, how earnest he sounds, when he rarely sounds anything _but,_ and yet—

—and yet.

She watches him approach, his reflection becoming more distinct as he draws slowly nearer to where she kneels.

“Are you real?”

The corner of his mouth twitches upwards. “Are you?”

The darkness throws his features into dramatic relief, the slopes and uneven curves of his nose and cheekbones carved out of the night by a silvered rime of watery starlight. Her scar splits his cheek, a pale slice she can scarcely take her eyes off (or stop thinking of how much further down his body it cuts). His mouth, so full and red, makes her think of blood; of flesh, of the sweet, tart fruits she’d dug into in Maz Kanata’s house. The old pirate’s table had been replete with fruits so lush and plump and fresh the juices had flooded over Rey’s hands and lips like ambrosia: she looks at Kylo’s mouth and thinks of that burst of fluid on her tongue, new and strange and sharp with delight.

“I thought I saw something,” she admits, shying away from that alien curl of heat in her belly, pretending to be captivated by the way her breath condenses on the glass, “but it was only me.”

His head cocks to one side. “Is that not enough?”

“Don’t,” Rey says quietly, pushing herself to her feet to put her at less of a disadvantage. How much easier it is, to assume he mocks her fears, than to think he might mean it. “Don’t be cruel.”

“I’m not,” he moves closer still, until she imagines she can almost feel the heat of him at her back. “The dark shows the truth of things. Don’t hide from it.”

“I’m not hiding,” she mutters.

“You are. You saw yourself, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she whispers, “alone.”

Kylo's gaze meets hers in the glass.

“Never.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _He moves closer still, until she imagines she can almost feel the heat of him at her back. “The dark shows the truth of things. Don’t hide from it.”_  
>     
>  _“I’m not hiding.”_
> 
> _“You are. You saw yourself, didn’t you?”_
> 
> _“Yes. Alone.”_  
>     
>  _Kylo's gaze meets hers in the glass._
> 
> _“Never.”_

_Never._

A ripple runs across the mirror’s surface, like the night wind over dark waters. Rey can’t help the shaky little breath that escapes her, or the way something low in her belly _clenches_ at the intensity in Kylo’s voice. He means it, with every part of him, and maybe that doesn’t mean much when better men have broken sweeter promises but it makes her heart race all the same.

Then it makes her scowl. Who is he, to tell her she is not alone?

 _You aren’t even_ real.

A thousand Reys shift in the glass, observing the pair of them with expectant eyes. Across reality, across time, a thousand watchful echoes of her meet Kylo’s stare and whisper, defiant, _liar._

Black eyes track the descent of a tear towards her chin.

“Rey…”

Now her heart flutters. She’s never heard her name spoken like this; with such softness and promise, full with the weight of things for which she has no name. She blinks away the threat of more tears and straightens her shoulders.

This place will not be her undoing.

“There’s nothing here,” she says, shrugging like none of it matters anyway. Kylo regards her contemplatively for a moment before turning his attention to the mirror’s curved edge. He studies it in silence, gnawing on the inside of his cheek in the way she’s begun to recognise as an uncertain habit.

When did she have time to notice that?

“Nothing you wish to see,” he says eventually.

Rey bristles, defensive. There’s a rebuttal already tripping on the tip of her tongue— _you don’t know a thing about what I want, not a damn thing_ —but it stays there, caught behind her bared teeth. She did not come here to fight.

She meets her own eyes in the mirror. Her other selves watch, voiceless, accusatory.

You are not here to hide, either, they seem to say.

My whole life has been fighting or hiding, Rey wants to answer. I don’t know how to do anything else.

Keeping herself safe is all she knows how to do. It’s all she ever has done. She had hated the isolation of her life in the Badlands but there had been safety there; it protected her, as the years passed and the notches on the wall spread and the loneliness grew into something insurmountable, and even the other souls who scraped their living from the wasteland seemed far and cold and distant as the stars. This is the way of cruel places the galaxy over: to keep ourselves safe we make ourselves into islands, we retreat into deserts of our own making and bury our hearts where they can’t be found; if they cannot touch you then they cannot hurt you, you learn, and so we make ourselves untouchable. We do it so readily—possibly we are too eager to shut ourselves away in this life, to make our hearts unassailable so we do not have to feel them break, but loneliness seems such a small price to pay to be safe.

Or at least, it had done. It can’t be endured forever. It isn’t supposed to be.

 _I have been lonely long enough._ Rey looks her mirrored others in the eye and wonders if they understand; if they know what it is to be alone, if solitude shadowed their lives until they forgot what it felt like to be known, to be loved, to be _seen;_ until they forgot that they’d ever known those things at all.

Maybe not. Maybe she was just the unlucky one.

Something hollow takes root inside her at the thought.

She had forgotten those things, she thinks. For the longest time it was as if she was invisible, as if she had simply disappeared and no one thought to tell her, and it was _safer_ that way, but with the weight of Kylo’s gaze still lingering on her face Rey remembers what it is to be seen.

Her hand is still pressed flat against the mirror and she couldn’t hope to disguise the way it trembles but his eyes are focused so wholly on her own, like it would ruin him to look away, and maybe he doesn’t notice the way she shivers but Rey knows without the shadow of a doubt that he sees _her._

He’s always seen me, she thinks numbly.

As she watches, a new resolve comes over his face. Slowly, his stare unwavering, he brings his left hand up to his mouth and puts the gloved tip of his forefinger between his teeth. He bites down, tugging on the leather to loosen it before he peels it from his skin.

In the watery light his hand looks pale as bone, and Rey can follow every shift of muscle in his powerful arm when he lifts it to rest gently over hers.

His fingers slot into the spaces between her own and something flutters in her stomach at the sight of how completely he dwarfs her. His palm is broad enough to swallow her hand, his fingers thick and blunt enough to fit two of hers into each one, but the man is not all brute. His skin looks so _soft_ and Rey wonders if it’s because of the gloves he wears, if the leather has protected him from calluses and scars the way it’s kept his white flesh from the sun. She feels a faint pang of jealousy at the thought. Her own hands are rough and careworn by comparison, though she never thought anything of it until she had something to compare it to.

Nor had she ever thought of herself as _small_ until now; she is tall for a woman but Kylo is enormous for a man and _gods,_ has she ever been more aware of it than here with him all around her, his shoulders hunched like he can hear the thread of her thoughts and tries to make himself less massive?

She thinks of him, crouched before her in that room where she was chained, of how she’d felt the way he stared up at her with such baffling _wonder_ and known even then that something had changed forever.

Her heart gives an uneasy thump.

He is so careful, now, not to touch her, leaving a whisper of space between their fingers like it matters when they’re lightyears apart, and it’s a strange gesture for a monster but maybe Rey isn’t the only one afraid that she’s imagining things.

If she were only a figment of his daydreams, a vision sent out of the ether of the Force, would she want to know it?

He’s reflected clearly in the mirror behind her, his arm reaching over her shoulder. She can see his fingers splayed between her own, pick out every last detail down to the whorls of his fingerprints pressed against the glass. She can _feel_ his breath on her neck, hot and dry against her damp skin, feel the furnace heat of his body at her back. And yet, when she looks at her own hand and the space beside her where Kylo’s thick, muscular arm should be, there’s nothing there.

Just her.

Maybe neither of us are real, Rey muses, as Kylo’s eyes dart from her face to their joined hands and back again. He swallows uneasily.

Her head is swimming. Summoning her courage, Rey shifts slightly on her feet, edging backwards until the space between them narrows and her shoulders come to rest against his broad, solid chest.

The air leaves her in a shocked rush.

There’d be no one there if she turned around, she knows it instinctively, and yet—she can _feel_ him. She’s _touching_ him: how warm he is; how solid, how _real,_ the heat of him bleeding through her from her scapulae to the base of her spine.

 _You’re not real,_ Rey shivers, leans further into him anyway and tells herself it’s only because she’s so _cold._

_You’re not here. This isn’t real. It’s just the mirror, don’t be fooled. None of this is real._

But in the glass Kylo’s eyes are blown wide with awe and disbelief, and a thread of doubt creeps in.

“How?” he breathes. Robbed of words, Rey can only shake her head.

_I don’t know, I don’t—_

She’ll never know what makes her do it, what moves her to turn her hand so that it rests palm-up on the glass. So that it faces Kylo’s. She isn’t even sure what she means by it—it’s an offering, of sorts, an invitation, though not one that he seems to comprehend until he catches her eye again and Rey sees the realisation dawn on his face.

Slowly, his huge hand wraps around her own, a rapt awe transforming his features as their palms slide together and his fingers curl between hers to settle over the notches of her knuckles.

He cradles her hand with a gentleness of which she hadn’t believed him capable. How easily he could turn cruel, she thinks: how effortlessly he could do her harm if he willed it. He could crush the delicate bones of her fingers without a thought. He could crush _her_ with his bare hands.

Part of her wants to dare him, to see what he does. To see if he _would._

To see if she would stop him.

Instead, she lets her head fall back to rest against his chest and thrills a little at the unsteady breath that shudders through him. His heartbeat thunders between her shoulder blades: he rises and falls like the tide under her back.

It makes her bold, knowing she isn’t the only one strung taut with indecision by where they stand.

That she isn’t the only one tempted.

“How is this possible?” she whispers.

“I don’t know,” Kylo answers softly, still gazing at her with those dark, dark eyes, swollen pupils bright with the sheen of moonlight flooding in from above. Rey sees whole galaxies there, oceans of stars without end; a universe unfolding in the space between her mind and his and they two the only living things left in any of it. Their reflections dance in the misty light, distorted echoes spun out into the star-scattered infinite as Rey lifts her right hand and wiggles her fingers.

Watching those other selves wave back out of the dark, she can almost pretend that it’s one of them who does what she does next—that it’s another Rey, a different Rey, who reaches up to rest her hand against Kylo’s cheek, right over the pale pink slice of his scar.

He trembles beneath her palm.

The Force tangles around them wherever they touch: their hands, the narrow space between their bodies, the unconscious way her breathing has fallen into sync with his and the very blood coursing through her veins seems to be trying to outrun his racing heart. Between the broad, blazing wall of him at her back and the weight of the island and the ocean and what feels like the universe itself pressing in on her from all sides, Rey understands suddenly the strange sickness that took those who spent too long out in the open back on Jakku. The ones who thought themselves too tough to seek shelter during the hottest part of the day, when the sands burned too fiercely to set foot on and veils of white fire engulfed the horizon. Out they would go, into the emptiness, chasing phantoms of water and shade to the other side of the light. Sun-blindness, they called it. The midday fever. The longing of the mad to be consumed.

She wants to crawl inside him, to find his darkest places and make room for herself there; to feed on what Kylo offers until she’s satiated or he is spent. She wants to devour and to _be_ devoured, and the way his hand tightens on hers when she says his name aloud lets her know he feels the same.

The heat of his stare makes her press her thighs together as it falls from her eyes to her mouth and becomes _hunger._

Lifting his other hand, Kylo rests it lightly on her side, gloved fingertips just curving around her hip. He watches her, gauging her reaction as his fingers creep downward—studying the catch of her breath, the flush of colour high in her cheeks, the shift of her features for any sign of hesitation or uncertainty—but the only signals Rey’s giving off right now are very much urging him to _move faster._

Obligingly, his palm spreads across her middle and pulls her more firmly against him, into the insistent fullness pressed hot and aching near the base of her spine. Rey rolls her hips into him, emboldened further by the ragged sound that tears from his throat in response—a sound it takes her a second to recognise as her _name._

It makes her lose her mind a little.

 _Rey, Rey,_ his desire rolls over her, fingers marking trails of fire across her skin when he dips his hand lower to cover her abdomen in a way that makes her insides twist deliciously— _stars,_ who knew it could make her blood burn so to feel herself surrounded in this way, his fingers nearly spanning the width of her hip-to-hip? He brings his hand up again, strumming his fingertips more purposefully over the sensitive spur of her hipbone when the first inadvertent brush makes her whimper.

“There?” His voice is little more than a murmur but it fills her head, his eyes searching hers for—assurance? Guidance? His grip tightens around her hand. “Tell me.”

 _“Yes,”_ she whispers, chasing his touch with the movement of her hips, _“yes, oh—”_

“I’ve got you,” he presses the words into her hair and the low rumble of his voice sets shivers down her spine. “Show me.”

“What?”

 _“Show me,”_ his fingers toy with the waistband of her leggings, “what to do.”

Heat spreads low and sweet through her belly: reaching down, she takes him by the wrist and guides him home.

They both gasp at the first brush of his gloved fingers between her thighs. Kylo makes a low sound and buries his face in her neck but the urge to _watch_ is irresistible and he quickly lifts his head again, settling his chin on Rey’s shoulder so he can look her in the eye as his touch slips deeper, further into the soft slick heat of her.

The thready moan that escapes her when his thumb glides over her clit is all he needs to hone in on it like a hound to the scent, circling with a maddeningly light touch that leaves her _whining_ for the relief he holds just out of reach.

“Rey,” his mouth drags over her shoulder, _“Rey—”_

_Please, oh, please._

His fingers have been busy mapping out the undiscovered contours of her body, eager and curious to learn this new country like he knows no greater purpose than pleasing her—than teasing out the kind of sounds she’s never _heard_ from her own lips before—but Kylo falters when he finds the place where her body opens to his touch, and a breathless _oh_ leaves him as his forefinger slips inside.

She can feel his hesitation, wonders fleetingly if this is as new for him as it is for her (hells, newer, she’s at least no stranger to her own touch), but there’s no thought in her of turning back now. No thought of anything but chasing that sensation, of urging him with her voice and her movements to stop playing games and _give her what she wants._

 _“Yes,”_ she hisses, digging her nails into his forearm as he begins to nudge that finger into her, mouthing sloppily at her neck to distract her from the stretch. Her body welcomes him, a heat that gives and grasps and pulls him deeper into the lush silken dark where he would gladly _drown._

 _More,_ she rocks back into him again, grips his forearm and _shows_ him the pressure she needs. His body bows over her in his haste to obey, bracing her and surrounding her, and she should feel cowed like this—she should feel _tiny,_ but he grinds the heel of his palm against her clit and _oh,_ she is endless—she is a live wire, she is light unravelling, she is a constellation and Kylo is the only thing holding all of her together even as his touch threatens to shatter her to pieces, pulling waves of pleasure out of her until he can work another finger in beside the first.

“You’re not alone,” he says into her hair, fingers crooking sweetly inside her until she _keens._

“I—”

“Say it.”

“What?”

_“Say it.”_

“I know,” she whimpers, tossing her head back against his shoulder and baring the arc of her neck to him again. Kylo wastes no time in covering every inch of her he can reach in more kisses, scraping his teeth over the soft skin below her ear, and her eyes fall closed when his tongue flicks out to taste the salt of her. _“I know.”_

They fly open again when his hand leaves hers and comes to sit lightly at the base of her throat.

She tenses immediately, searches his eyes in the glass for the slightest hint of threat or menace, but he does nothing more than hold her there and in his face she sees only an intense, feverish need that mirrors her own.

And a question, a _plea._

_Can I?_

_Yes—oh, yes—_

Reaching up with her newly-freed hand, Rey sinks her fingers into his hair and _tugs._ At the same time she clenches around him, thrilling at the way he groans into her hair, at the way his own hand flexes but stays loose around her throat.

“Perfect,” he breathes, as the third finger presses into her, “so perfect, _Rey,”_ and the way she stretches around him is like nothing she’s ever felt but all Rey can think of is how else he might fill her—how much more of him she could take, and how much more of him _she wants._

She stares at her own face in the mirror, at her eyes blown black with arousal and her skin flushed and her hair falling loose about her cheeks like some wild thing, like the waves that break over the rocks beyond the cave’s entrance. She _feels_ like a wild creature, strung-out and scattered, changed in ways she can’t name by this place and the things she’s seen here: she feels like something has sundered inside her that will never be whole in the same way again—she feels brittle, and broken, and breathless. She feels _free._

She _is_ free. She is Rey, and maybe none of this is real but that much is unchanged.

That much will never change.

He slips his fingers from her and she could _wail_ for the loss of them—for the loss of _him—_ inside her, but it’s only for an instant and then he’s working at her clit with such fevered determination that just like that she’s _right there,_ poised on the brink and urging him to take her the rest of the way. Pleasure spikes through her veins and oh, _gods,_ she’s going to die, she’s going to lose her _mind_ if he doesn’t do something—and maybe she will even if he does because this is when he opens that pretty pink mouth of his and rasps _I’ve got you._

And that—oh, mightn’t _that_ just be enough to ruin her?

_Please—_

_I’ve got you,_ he whispers again, his other hand dragging higher on her neck to hold her more firmly against him, pressing finger and thumb against her pulse points while the rhythm he finds between her legs coaxes her ever higher toward the glittering silvered heights of an _earth-shattering_ release.

Oh, _Force—_

The hand that had gripped Kylo's at her cunt rises sharply to brace her against the mirror as her knees buckle and the _slap_ of it reverberates around them as Rey comes with a shout, the sharp cry tearing from her at the same time as a broken _groan_ leaves him. The sound rumbles through her where their bodies press together—she can feel his _heart_ inside her and nothing has ever felt like this, so devastatingly _close;_ it's too much for anyone to bear—can he feel her pleasure, she wonders? Can he feel her the way she feels him? And then she wonders nothing at all because she's falling apart, helpless, shining, perfect, _so perfect,_ the Force itself is singing with her euphoria and the sudden blanket of _peace_ that descends over her mind—there's nothing left, nothing but the weight of him at her back and the heat of him all around her, the pleasure still turning her limbs to liquid and her veins to gold. The other Reys shatter with her, a hundred thousand of her lost in their release, a hundred thousand of him bowed in veneration to it as the Force trembles and her voice softens and the cave walls around them _shake_ with her climax.

She slumps forward against the glass, slack-limbed and breathless, the aftershocks still sparking through her body like she'd gripped a live cable by mistake.

Kylo's body heaves against her back, colossal, engulfing, everything.

And then it doesn't.

A rush of cold hits her. When Rey opens her eyes to the darkness again, she is alone.

Or—as alone as one can be, in a place like this, with the luminous energy of the universe still filling her bones with light. It sings sleepily around her, languid and tender and sated. It tugs at her the way the sea had when she’d dipped her feet into its swirling currents; an invisible tide pulling at the waters deep inside her, the wellspring that connects her with every living thing in the galaxy. She feels them now, all of them. She feels _everything._

She is wild, exhilarated, weightless, she is infinitesimal and she is infinite.

She is _alive._

Rey half-expects morning to have come while she was down here but moonlight still spills in through the cave entrance, painting its walls white as the sea foams slick against the rocks. Rey turns toward the ocean, contemplating her return to the island above—to the _world_ above. It had all seemed so vast, so full and so loud before: a little too much, of light and darkness, of sound and silence, of everything, and far too much for a nobody from the outer edge of nowhere to make her way through alone.

She looks over her shoulder, into the face of the woman in the mirror; into her own too-bright eyes. Is there something different there?

Perhaps she is braver. Perhaps she is just less afraid.

What she was searching for, down here under the island...did she find it?

Perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Once she leaves this place, the memory of what happened here will fade, growing dull around the edges until she will never be sure which parts of it were real. If any of it was—if _he_ was ever here, or if she conjured it all up out of her own solitude. She will leave it behind like a dream in the morning until only the vaguest recollection remains of his voice in her head; of hands on her skin, of eyes burning into hers through the dark.

Outside, the midnight tide laps at the shore.

**Author's Note:**

> title from NeO's 'urn, part i (and within the void we are breathless)'


End file.
